Full-flow staged combustion, told as hardware.

A 34-second, 1,020-frame explainer of a methane and liquid-oxygen rocket engine that uses the full-flow staged combustion cycle. It is a Raptor-inspired conceptual model: the cycle layout matches the public architecture, and the drawing omits pressures, shaft speeds, mixture ratios, gimbal angle, and any coaxial pump.

Consolidated working brief. Not a certified engineering reference. Verify subject-specific details before publication or reuse.

What the five acts show

0 to 5 seconds. Liquid methane and liquid oxygen arrive on separate feed lines and enter separate turbopumps. Each pump has its own shaft. The impeller symbol rotates slowly so the motion can be read. That rotation is not a shaft speed.

5 to 10 seconds. The discharges split. The larger oxygen share and a little methane enter the oxidizer-rich preburner. The larger methane share is the cooling stream, and a little oxygen enters the fuel-rich preburner. Line weight is a teaching contrast, not a measured ratio. The burn in each preburner is partial combustion, not detonation.

10 to 17 seconds. Preburner gas drives the turbine on its own shaft, then keeps going. Both streams enter the main injector. In this cycle the turbine exhaust is propellant, not a dump.

17 to 25 seconds. The two hot streams burn in the main chamber, again as confined combustion, not detonation. Methane in the wall channels takes heat out of the liner. An enlarged section changes scale and says so. Combustion markers are slowed.

25 to 34 seconds. The bell expands the gas. A textbook nozzle diagram shows the ideal subsonic, sonic, and supersonic stations, and the ideal thrust relation, with no measured values substituted. The camera then holds on the whole engine.

What was left out on purpose

No chamber pressure, pump pressure, turbine temperature, rotational speed, thrust, mass flow, expansion ratio, or mixture ratio. No gimbal and no angle. No claim that the symbol placement matches a flight engine's packaging. The cooling-circuit order is the usual full-flow teaching order: pump, jacket, fuel-rich preburner. It is labeled as a schematic route.

How to read the colors

Cyan is the propellant path. Gold is shaft work or heat. Violet marks a change of state. None of the three is a claim about visible emission. Cut metal stays in the muted structural range around #344257.